She came and knelt before him and said, "Lord, help me." He answered, "It is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs." She said, "Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master's table." Then Jesus answered her, "Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish." And her daughter was healed instantly.
Matthew 15:26-28
Mothers can be powerful when they are desperate for their children.
My own mother stands at about 5 feet and 4 inches. One morning, when I was a teenager, I fainted in the shower. When my mother heard my body hit the ground, she pulled the entire bathroom door off its hinges. The bathroom door was locked. We had to get a repairman to come and put the door back on.
In the gospel, we hear about a mother. This woman had a little baby girl. She loved her child, that much is very obvious from the gospel. She loved her little daughter with all her being. But one day, that little girl began to have fits. We don’t exactly know what those fits looked like, but the mother claimed that her daughter had been seized by a demon
I have always imagined that her little one became epileptic and that those seizures were violent and terrifying. Her little girl one day must have begun to writhe and jerk, to foam at the mouth and then go limp. Her child just would suddenly have been lost to her, present one moment with smiles and then she became a frightening mass of flesh. She would wet her pants and bite her tongue. And her mother was desperate, absolutely desperate.
In the days of Jesus, women amounted to nothing. And Canaanites were considered not even human, not worthy of being taught about God. They worshipped idols. They were lost to God and were not to be saved. This is what Jesus had been taught.
When Jesus passes by, this mother races up to him and begs for him to help her daughter. And Jesus does not even answer her. All of his life, he had been taught not to speak to Canaanites. They were dogs, not worthy of attention. But the woman will not give up. Her desperation for her daughter drives her to assert herself in ways that were unfathomable back then. She yells and screams at Jesus.
“Send her away,” the disciples say. And Jesus tells her that he cannot take the food that is meant for the Jews and feed it to the dogs. I have always been bothered by these words, for they seem so unfair, but they were what Jesus had been taught. He was simply parroting what he had heard all of his life.
“Yes, Lord,” she says, “But even the dogs eat the crumbs from under their master’s table.”
And with her powerful words, Jesus looks at the woman. He looks at her and he really sees her. He sees beyond all that he has been taught. He sees a human being with tremendous faith. He sees a mother who adores her daughter. He sees as broken woman who would who do anything, anything to make her child well. And Jesus realizes that everything he has been taught is wrong. “Woman,” he says, “great is your faith.” And when he recognizes her, her prayers are answered.
When Joseph was ruling Egypt, he was busy distributing food to all the hungry people, when his brothers came to him. His brothers, who in their jealousy and envy, had sold him as a slave when he was just a child, come to ask for food. And at first Joseph does not let them know who he really is. He impresses them with his wealth and his power, scaring them by making it look like one of them had stolen something from him, keeping one of them hostage in his prison. But eventually he gets tired of playing games, and when they tell him that their father cannot bear to lose another son, Joseph sends all the servants out of the room. Then he breaks down and cries. He wails so loudly that people can hear throughout the palace. It is as if the truth is just bursting out of him. “I am Joseph, whom you sold as a slave,” he says.
The Scripture says that, at that moment, the brothers of Joseph open their eyes and they see him. They see who he truly is: a powerful man, the man who will save their family from famine, but also their little brother, who was mistreated by them, that little boy that they threw into a pit and sold as a slave. For the first time in their entire lives, they see him for who he really is. When they were children, they did not really see him. All that they saw was this annoying little brother, a brat, a braggart. His words made them angry, they despised him. But when Joseph the ruler reveals himself to them, and their eyes are open, they see him as he truly is, as their brother and also as a great man. And they are able to love him, no longer to be jealous or violent, but simply to love him for who he is.
If only we could see one another as Joseph’s brothers saw him, as Jesus saw the Canaanite woman. If only we would look at the person in the next pew and really see them, struggling to do the best they can, a person of great beauty and enormous depth. But instead we waste our lives living under an illusion, that everyone else is happy, and that we alone are broken and in need of God’s grace.
There was a young woman who went to college with me. We sang in the choir together. I knew her name. One night, we were sitting together on a couch in the choir lounge and she asked me if she could come and hang out with me and my friends. She explained that she didn’t really have any good friends. I said sure, but I got busy and never really thought about it.
Three weeks later, she hung herself by an extension chord in her dorm room.
At her funeral, I had terrible feelings of guilt. And I kept talking to her inside my mind. I would ask her over and over again, “Why? Why could you not have shown me who you really were? I had no idea that you were in so much pain! Why didn’t you tell me?”
She had given me a glimpse of her loneliness but she had glossed over it, making it sound like something that she wanted to work on, not something that was tearing her apart inside. I did not really know who she was. Had I known who she was, I would have rushed over to her dorm room and introduced her to everyone I knew. I would have tried to help her. If only I had known. But I never really saw her.
We go through our lives hardly seeing one another. You can come to church and sit next in the same pew with someone for months and never know that the person is getting a divorce or that their father is dying of cancer. We say hello to one another. We say, “How are you?” and the expected answer is “Fine.” That’s all most of us want to hear, “Fine.” There is this social expectation that we will not really tell the truth, not really tell each other about our pain or our struggles. So we say fine.
It’s only places like Alcoholics Anonymous where people are forced to be brutally honest. Their addictions force them to the tell truth up front about who they are. They are told to say, “Hello, My name is Frank. I am an alcoholic.” But in the rest of the world we don’t do that, we don’t say, “Hello, My name is Jennifer. I am estranged from my sister.” Or “Hello, my name is Dan. I suffer from chronic depression.” Or “Hello, my name is Sally. I am lonely.” Instead, we just say, “I’m fine.” And we tell each other where we live and what we do for a living. And we do not know one another at all.
Look at the person next to you. See them. That person is unfathomable, deep and full of mystery. That person has experienced pain and suffering. That person is beloved of God.
I have started taking yoga. At the end of the class the teacher puts her hands together like this, and she says a Hindu word, Namaste. I have been saying it for months. But only a few days ago did someone tell me what it means. It means, I See You.
